The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (13 page)

Not only the scientific and medical center of Europe, Paris had replaced Vienna as the musical capital, and it was where theater, ballet, and the visual arts were at their vibrant best. Parisians
could see exhibitions of current work by Delacroix, Ingres, Corot, and Courbet; attend recitals by Liszt and Paganini; hear the latest compositions by Berlioz and Rossini, who, as director of the Théâtre-Italien, had revolutionized the public’s response to opera. Rachel, the great French classical tragedienne, was conquering Paris;
Marie Taglioni, the legendary star of romantic ballet, though past her prime, was still captivating audiences by seeming to float above the stage; her successor Carlotta Grisi had inspired poet
Théophile Gautier to create
Giselle.

Paris was also a city of readers. Foreign visitors would be surprised to see a flower seller or street porter with a book in hand—very likely the latest novel by
Eugène Sue or Alexandre Dumas père, both at the peak of their fame and revered by rich and poor. This was the age of serialization. A popular triumph like Sue’s
Mysteries of Paris
, a naturalistic novel set in the city’s underworld, was published in enticing intallments in the
Journal des Débats
between June and October 1843. Even illiterate people, eager to know what happened next, would form a crowd as the next installment was read aloud to them. At the other end of the social scale, readings were held in grand salons as a way of testing reactions and publicizing new works. The Boulevard cafés and restaurants, frequented by the prominent writers and journalists of the day, provided another lively stimulus for literary conversations—as did the Boulevard itself.

An elite strolling ground with the boulevard des Italiens as its epicenter, this area was like an exclusive club with a perpetual flux of famous and familiar faces. During one promenade in October 1840, Liszt ran into, among other friends, Heine, Balzac, Chopin, and Berlioz. For Balzac the Boulevard was “
the poem of Paris”—what the Grand Canal is to Venice; for
Alfred de Musset it was “one of the points of the earth where the pleasure of the world is concentrated.” Paved in asphalt and lit with gas lamps, the Boulevard had very distinct parameters, extending from the rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin to the passage de l’Opéra (the avenue
and place de l’Opéra did not yet exist) and ending at the corner of the rue de la Grange-Batelière (today’s rue Drouot). It was considered bad form to show oneself beyond these boundaries, and
flâneurs
rarely strayed from beyond the Théâtre de Variétés, a deserted area Musset called the Far Indies.

There was usually a triple circle of tilburies and coaches parked in front of Tortoni on the corner of boulevard des Italiens and rue Taitbout. Founded at the end of the eighteenth century by a Neapolitan gelaterio, it was taken over by a man called Tortoni, who turned the café into a Parisian landmark due to the excellence of its ice creams and sorbets. Frock-coated dandies sat at outdoor tables or congregated around the staircase posing, chattering, and eyeing passing beauties. A carriage and four might pull up with two postilions, one of whom would run in to buy a sorbet for madame, who sat studying the comings and goings through her lorgnette.
Nestor Roqueplan was a regular at Tortoni, telling witty anecdotes while leaning against the banister or preventing the impatient waiters from clearing tables and going home. There almost every night between 11:30 p.m. and 1:00 a.m., he would then move next door to the Café Riche because of its late closing hours, joining other insomniacs, who included the writers Gustave Claudin and Henri Murger. Earlier in the evening, Roqueplan would have dined either at La Maison d’Or, sitting at his usual table by the door, or at the
Café de Paris, which was considered to be the headquarters of the noble company of the Boulevard.

Facing Tortoni, in part of an
hôtel particulier
, the Café de Paris had the understated elegance of an aristocratic family house, furnished with superb antiques, paintings, and mirrors and lit by candles, oil lamps, and the glow of wood fires. It was not only the best restaurant in Paris but reputedly the best in Europe. The chef had once worked for the
Duchess de Berry and could make an art of the simplest dish, such as veal casserole—a “
culinary glory” and specialty of the house. Dumas père, who loved cooking
almost more than writing, would frequently be taken down to the kitchens for a consultation on a recipe. Almost every evening there was a tasting exchange between clients. “For instance,” writes the English journalist
Albert Vandam, “Dr Veron, who was very fond of Musigny vintage, rarely missed offering some to the Marquis du Hallays, who, in his turn, sent him the finest dishes from his table.” The headwaiter, the urbane, deferential Martin Guépet, would not turn chance customers or sight-seers away, but there was rarely a strange face or discordant voice among the diners. To
Gustave Claudin, novelist and chronicler of Parisian mores, there was an unspoken, uncontested rule of selection at the Café de Paris: “
Nobody was tolerated who could not lay claim to some sort of distinction or originality. A kind of invisible moral barrier existed, shutting out the mediocre, the insipid, and the insignificant, who passed by, but did not linger, knowing that their place was not there.”

Marie, herself, was a regular, always welcome at
Dr. Louis Véron’s table—the most prestigious in the restaurant. A stout, jovial bachelor who dined there almost every night, Véron had trained in medicine and made his fortune from a chest ointment, using some of the proceeds to found
Revue de Paris
and revive
Le Constitutionnel
, the most widely read newspaper of the day. Thanks to his business flair (and the lure of his star ballerina,
Marie Taglioni), his five-year stint as director of the Opéra had been a financial triumph and is regarded to this day as a golden age. Véron was immensely popular because he was generous to the point of profligacy—always picking up the bill and offering his authors double the going rate—his conspicuous materialism typical of the money-fixated middle classes who had risen to prominence over the last decade. Although disagreeable to look at, with sagging cheeks and blinking, piggy eyes, Véron was as vain and mannered as a Regency roué, wearing a massive cravat to hide his scarred, scrofulous neck. He loved the company of young women, over whom he seemed to wield a mystifying
power. “
I gave in because he had a hold over me,” said the actress Rachel, explaining why she had chosen Véron as her first lover when she was just seventeen.

Nineteen-year-old Marie was also impressed by Véron’s wealth and influence. As the daughter of a peddler and child of the streets, like Rachel, she could understand his arriviste brashness and may even have shared the actress’s bizarre attraction to him. Professionally, he was the key to a legion of important contacts, and his table at the back of the restaurant was a magnet for them all. “
Le Tout Paris du Boulevard
files past from six o’clock until midnight,” wrote one observer, adding that Véron had hardly sat down before twenty hands shook his and ten people stopped to linger by his side. Marie’s lowly origins intrigued Véron. One evening, after she had left the table, he remarked, “I confess,
Alphonsine Plessis interests me very much. She is, first of all, the best-dressed woman in Paris. Secondly, she neither flaunts nor hides her vices. Thirdly, she is not always talking or hinting about money. In short, she is a wonderful courtesan.”

It was the chance to be part of a rarefied, fascinating milieu like this that encouraged Marie to make the most of her profession. “
I wanted to know the refinements and pleasure of artistic taste,” she once said, “the joy of living in elegant and cultivated society.” It had allowed her not only to indulge her sybaritic nature but to choose her world. The writers who frequented the Café de Paris—Musset, Sue, Balzac, Dumas—were the writers whose books Marie bought. She owned a ten-volume edition of
The Three Musketeers
, and her
library of carved oak contained more than two hundred books: classics by Rabelais, Walter Scott, Marivaux, Byron, Molière, and Cervantes as well as works by contemporaries such as Lamartine and
Victor Hugo. As
Charles Matharel de Fiennes wrote, “These were the men with whom she wanted to keep company.”

The Café de Paris literati were also regular guests in the most brilliant salon of the decade, hosted by Mme de Girardin, herself
a writer, whose drawing room was a center for men and women to meet on equal terms. Prowess in intellectual conversation was crucial to French culture, and like the great
salonnières
before her, Mme de Staël and Mme Récamier, Delphine de Girardin challenged the accepted notion of passive virtue for women—remaining silent on topics outside their domestic sphere. And yet even she was circumscribed by convention. When
Arsène Houssaye’s first novel,
The Lovely Sinner
, was published, Mme de Girardin remarked in her
Courrier de Paris
column that she had enjoyed the charming first volume but had refrained from reading the second, having heard that it was too indelicate. This had rankled Houssaye at the time, but twenty years later he felt that Mme de Girardin was right, and in his preface quotes Rousseau’s own warning about his novel
The New Hélöise
, a passionate exchange of lovers’ letters, saying that no chaste girl must ever read it: “
Whoever dares look at a single page of mine is a lost woman.” When Gautier examined Marie’s books after her death, he found that
The New Hélöise
was one of the two most-thumbed volumes in her collection. The other was
Manon Lescaut
, Abbé Prévost’s story of a beautiful young courtesan.

Through the Café de Paris, Marie had the best of both worlds: no inhibitions of propriety and access to the civilizing advantages of a salonlike atmosphere—an informal university for women. But how could a country girl, who a few years earlier could barely read or write, hold her own in this setting? Beauty was appreciated, but it was not a prerequisite of acceptance:
Esther Guimont, another “
friend of the Café de Paris band,” was as plain as she was ill educated, yet known as the
courtisane des lettres
because of her influence on the distinguished writers and politicians of the day. She was said to have lured away Delphine de Girardin’s husband, Emile, the most powerful journalist in Paris, because she made him laugh, and her wit and audacity had also won the heart of
Nestor Roqueplan.

It was Roqueplan who had discovered Alphonsine as a starving
waif on the Pont-Neuf, and he can only have been astonished by her transformation. A raconteur of great originality, he kept his Café de Paris companions amused by mocking everything and everyone (his nickname for Dr. Véron was The Prince of Weals). But although anyone invited to Roqueplan’s table was expected to be as cultured and satirical as he was, he nevertheless remained indulgent toward his little
gourmande.
She was, he said, “
without intellect, but with a rich instinct.”

Others were more skeptical. A romantic revolutionary in his twenties,
Arsène Houssaye had belonged to a bohemian group that included Gautier and the artist Gavarni. Now approaching middle-aged respectability, with a patriarchal beard, Houssaye felt that Marie was clever, “
but she talked nothing but nonsense. And yet with all this, or without all this, she achieved her renown by way of charm. When you were with her you had no wish to leave.” Marie’s candor about her lack of education only increased their interest,
Albert Vandam said. “She had a natural tact and an instinctive refinement which no education could have enhanced. She never made grammatical mistakes, no coarse expression ever passed her lips.” A bright young journalist of Dutch descent, Vandam was not one of the café’s literary lions, but he had been introduced to them at the age of twenty-one and was there many a night.
His main talent was as an observer, but his reputation for repeating what he overheard had made him something of an outsider. Perhaps because of this, or because he was so much closer to her own age, Marie welcomed his company. “She would often sit and chat to me. She liked me, because I never paid her many compliments.”

The infamous
Lola Montez was another young courtesan who had made it into the inner circle. She arrived in Paris in early March 1844 armed with letters of introduction from Liszt, her most recent conquest, and had soon begun several other important liaisons. Dumas, one possible lover, remained wary—“she has the evil eye,” he told Vandam—and, indeed, Lola Montez
was not what she seemed. Born Eliza Gilbert in Ireland’s County Sligo, she had adopted the persona of a Spanish dancer, despite having no talent other than a natural grace. She covered her shortcomings with a wild audacity, and, convincing herself that a course of lessons by the renowned ballet master Hippolyte Barrez was enough to prepare her, made her debut in late March on the hallowed Opéra stage. Facing a house full to bursting, she struck a provocative pose before removing her garter and tossing it into the stalls. The roar of approval turned to impatience as soon as Montez started to dance, and this first performance, like the one that followed two nights later, was a fiasco. But while everyone agreed that Lola Montez was no Taglioni, her singular, entertaining personality, enticing beauty, and mad ardor had made her something of a star. Twenty-one-year-old
Gustave Claudin, just beginning work as a journalist, felt bewitched by her: “There was about her
something provoking and voluptuous which drew you.”

Her brazenness was witnessed by Romain Vienne at a party given by Marie. He had hardly sat down before a sparkling young woman with a heavily made‑up face came prancing up to them, singing a popular opera tune. Placing a dainty foot on the arm of Vienne’s chair, she appeared about to repeat her garter trick but this time challenged him to slide the ribbon from her thigh. Determined not to appear fazed, he did just that, only to be roundly slapped by Lola, who ran off laughing. “Excuse her,” Marie said. “She behaves like this with all men—it’s her way of amusing herself.”